I Taught My Son How Not to Be a Rapist

It's a normal Sunday afternoon. After brunch, my 14-year-old son and I curl up on the couch to read while my husband works on a project in the garage. But no matter how hard I try to concentrate on the pages of novel in my lap, my mind keeps returning to the subject matter of my own book, which I finished the final revisions on just a few days before—a tale of a boy and girl who grew up together, best friends, until one fateful night in their twenties when both of their lives are forever changed.

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“Do you know what consent is?” I say to my son, closing the book I’m holding. My voice wavers when I ask the question, because despite the open discourse about sex I’ve maintained with my children over the years (“no erection without protection” is a phrase both daughter and son learned, then passed on in giggly whispers to their friends in middle school), and while I have talked with my daughter about ways to protect herself from being raped, I’ve never spoken directly to my son about how not to be a rapist.

My voice wavers, too, because the subject triggers a wave of traumatic memories I’ve spent years trying to forget. I was on the edge of 15 when I was sexually assaulted. The boy was older, someone I’d had a crush on, and so when he unzipped his jeans and forced himself down my throat while we were sitting together in the front seat of his car, I didn’t fight, I didn’t pull away. I only endured, waiting for the pain and paralyzing terror of what he was doing to loosen its vice-like grip on my chest. My throat ached for days, but shame sewed my lips shut and prevented me from telling anyone what he had done. I believed I’d sent some kind of message that I had wanted this person—someone I knew and trusted—to do what he did. I thought it was my fault, for flirting with him. For being alone with him in his truck, for wearing a sexy dress, for smoking pot and telling him I wasn’t a virgin. For whispering “wait” instead of screaming “no.” For not fighting harder to get him to stop.

"We talk about victim-blaming, and how girls can often confuse having sex with being loved."

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Over the next few months, I cried through most of the hours I should have been sleeping, because during the day, I had to pretend like nothing had happened—that I hadn’t been forever changed. I laughed with my friends, did my homework, spent time with my family, even as guilt hardened the marrow of my bones, making me feel brittle, as though my entire skeleton might snap. A constant loop played inside my head: “You’re stupid, you’re disgusting, you’re a slut.”

I buried the pain I felt into the darkest corner of my soul, but still, the memory of him—of his hand on the back of my head, pushing—has stayed with me for years, following me like a second shadow, waking me in the night, stealing my breath. I’ve done my best to work through it. I’ve gone to therapy. I’ve talked about it; I understand that what happened wasn’t my fault. I’ve forgiven him—not for his sake, but for mine, so that I could finally allow the angry, puckered wound the assault left inside me to soften and heal.

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Still, I have thought about him over the years, wondering what it was that allowed him to think what he did was okay. He came from a good family—I’m certain he was taught all the same lessons about right and wrong that most parents teach their children. Perhaps his parents assumed it went without saying that rape is wrong, so they never specifically spoke with him about it. They assumed their sweet son wouldn’t be capable of doing something so heinous. I assume this because I, too, have a sweet son, and the last thing I’d ever want to believe is that he could rape someone.

The author pictured with her son.

Courtesy of Amy Hatvany

But the news is full of stories about “good” young men who commit rape, and the best way to help prevent my son from becoming one of them is to talk with him explicitly about the issue, and hopefully provide him with the kind of tools that will help him to make the right decision in a pinnacle moment. And so, I repeat the question, swallowing to restrain the tears tickling the back of my throat. “Honey,” I say. “Do you know what consent is?”

He looks at me with his heavily lashed, soulful brown eyes—the same eyes I remember falling in love with the moment he was born. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s getting permission from someone to do something.”

I meet his gaze, and hold it, and my breath. “Like permission to have sex with them.”

He rolls his eyes, knowing full-well I’m about to try to teach him a lesson. “Yeah,” he says, again. “Like that.”

“You know you need to make sure that a girl really wants to be doing the things you two might end up doing together,” I say, bumbling my words, unsure of the proper language to use. “You need to ask her. You never assume she wants to do something sexual with you, especially if either or both of you are drunk. She doesn’t have to say no to feel no. Silence is not consent. You get that, right?”

“God, Mom,” he says. He is offended, and maybe a little hurt. “You think I’m going to rape someone?”

“I don’t think you would mean to rape someone,” I say, carefully, “but I want you to really understand how to ask for a girl’s consent so you don’t ever end up in a questionable position. That’s all.”

He eyes me, warily, and I speak with him about rape culture in general, how the media uses women’s sexuality to marginalize them, to teach men to view women’s bodies as commodities, and then uses it against women when they report they’ve been raped. He tells me how there is a girl at school, in his eighth grade class, who everyone calls a whore because she has sex with some of the boys. We talk about victim-blaming, and how girls can often confuse having sex with being loved, and that this doesn’t make this particular girl a whore—it makes her someone in need of education and emotional support. We talk about how important it is if one of his friends is saying something inappropriate about a girl, that he should be courageous and tell his friend to shut the hell up. And if he sees a girl in trouble, in a situation where she is or might be hurt, that he should protect this girl as he might protect me or his sister. We talk about the six-month sentence ruling on the case of a Stanford student, how he should strive to be like the Swedes, who rescued the victim, and not the swimmer, who dragged her behind a dumpster and raped her.

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"It’s a seed planted so that someday, he’ll have this same conversation with his own son."

“So what do I say to a girl?” he asks me, then. “When I want to…you know.”

“You need to be absolutely sure she wants to have sex,” I say. “If she’s too drunk, or you are, to speak clearly, you don’t even try it. You go home alone and sleep it off. If she’s sober, you need to ask her if she’s sure she wants to do it. Whatever ‘it’ is. Touching, oral sex, intercourse.” He cringes a bit, here, as he does whenever I speak in graphic terms about sex, but I don’t let that stop me. “You need to say the words, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ and she needs to give you a verbal yes. It’s a good idea to ask her more than once. If she hesitates in any way, physically, like if she is stiff or not responding to your kissing her, or if she says something like ‘wait’ or ‘I don’t know,’ you stop. Right then. It’s over. You don’t push it. You tell her it’s fine. That you want her to be comfortable with whatever happens between you. And that you’re fine if nothing happens at all.”

He nods, and then returns his attention to his book, signaling that our conversation is over, but I am his mother, and I can sense the wheels turning in his head, processing everything we said. Internalizing it. My heart fizzes with relief. It’s a small step, a seed planted, one that I will continue to nurture so that someday he’ll have this same conversation with his own son. I can’t change that night in the pickup truck, all those years ago—but I will work to ensure that no man from my family will ever do to another girl what was done to me.

Amy Hatvany's latest novel, IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME, explores acquaintance rape. She lives in Seattle with her family.

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